Astronomers have taken a close-up photo of a star outside our own galaxy, the Milky Way, for the first time, the European Southern Observatory announced in a statement Thursday.
The star — WOH G64 — is 160,000 light-years from Earth, in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy that orbits the Milky Way, according to the observatory.
This image shows the location of the star within the Large Magellanic Cloud, with with some of the VLTI’s Auxiliary Telescopes in the foreground.
ESO/K. Ohnaka et al./Y. Beletsky
The star is about 2,000 times larger than our sun and is classified as a red supergiant. The star is puffing out gas and dust, in the last stages before it becomes a supernova, according to the observatory.
“We discovered an egg-shaped cocoon closely surrounding the star,” Keiichi Ohnaka, an astrophysicist from Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile and co-author of the study, said in a statement. “We are excited because this may be related to the drastic ejection of material from the dying star before a supernova explosion.”
This image shows an artist’s reconstruction of the star WOH G64, the first star outside our galaxy to be imaged in close-up.
ESO/L. Calcada
This image on the left is the first close-up picture of a star outside our galaxy, and the image on the right shows an artist’s impression reconstructing the geometry of the structures around the star, including the bright oval envelope and a fainter dusty torus.
ESO/K. Ohnaka et al./L. Calcada
Astronomers have known about the star for “decades” and have called it the “behemoth star,” according to the observatory.
“We have found that the star has been experiencing a significant change in the last 10 years, providing us with a rare opportunity to witness a star’s life in real time,” said Gerd Weigelt, an astronomy professor at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and co-author of the study.
This is an image of the star WOH G64, taken by the GRAVITY instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (ESO’s VLTI).
ESO/K. Ohnaka et al.
In their final life stages, red supergiants like WOH G64 shed their outer layers of gas and dust in a process that can last thousands of years.
“This star is one of the most extreme of its kind, and any drastic change may bring it closer to an explosive end,” said Jacco van Loon, a co-author in the study and Keele Observatory director at Keele University, who has been observing WOH G64 since the 1990s.
